Guidelines
This is a page to help people figure out where they should edit and where they should not. A short word from Emhilradim Hello there, initially when I set out to create this wiki, I had plans to create a fully fleshed out wiki that read like a lore book or game guide for players that people could edit when they found problems with this (much in the same style as most wikis, I imagine). Unfortunately the project was too big for one person (me), and so at some point I became frustrated. Both by the amount of vandalism that happens, and the sheer amount of pages to be deleted, edited, the information to be revised to reflect the original version of World of Warcraft (and by original I mean nearing the end just before the Burning Crusade transition patch went live). I've now appointed a few people who seem to know what they're doing to be administrators, so hopefully they can help put a stop to the vandalism. Who are the new administrators? * JorimKronos * Sitb Final statement Just like with trying to do everything myself, I can't quite see everything, so if you've been contributing heavily and I seemingly missed you, my apologies, but I will try to get around to fix my error. ''-Emhilradim'' The goal of this Wiki The goal of Vanilla WoW Wiki is to create a World of Warcraft resource that documents as much as possible (aside from trying to deconstruct the code or create a server; I'm sure someone's already written something on the matter, and it doesn't really belong here). So what are some of the guidelines? * All content should reflect the latest version of the original World of Warcraft, 1.12.2 (a bug fix patch for the 1.12 release). * Lore and Books is kind of a not sure situation. It seems more clean to use the stuff that was already out and omit the stuff that came after, or certain things get changed and it becomes a bit of a mess trying to explain that. * Stats and the like should reflect back before certain conventions were adopted into the game, (i.e. +1% chance to hit, as opposed to +12 hit rating). * Anything which has information about level 100, level 80, level 70, etc. that you find you should either place a tag on it to reflect that this information should be revised, or you could try your hand at revising yourself. If you feel that you're not sure if your revision is good enough, tag the page anyway and someone will look at it. * Pages that are not from classic World of Warcraft (pre- ) should be marked with a tag to let people know it should be deleted (FYI: you do not need to clear all content from a page to mark it for deletion). * There is to be no editing of community server pages which are in any way negative. This means no more vandalizing another server's page you don't play on, infractions will result in bans. Zero tolerance policy. * If anyone can figure out a way to fix the code bugs, that'd be great, because I'm really having a tough problem with it. A great example is the main page with all those ||| on the slider box. Editing tips *The Source Editor is an important tool. When making a new page, copy the source code from WoWWiki or Wowpedia. You can click on the arrow next to the edit button to look at the history of the page. Only take the current version if not much has changed on the topic in the expansions. Otherwise, go into the edit history for versions before 5th Dec 2006, that's the date when Blizzard rolled out the The Burning Crusade teaser patch aka patch 2.0.1. Data from 05.12.2006 onward does not qualify as "Vanilla" content. Always take a look at newer versions of pages too, since they often contain more and higher quality information if the subject hasn't changed much in the expansions. Use your common sense for this. *Type in the source editor to mark pages for deletion, if they are duplicate or not relevant to Vanilla WoW. *If you look at a random page, a lot of red links to missing pages may show up. It is the ultimate goal to have all those pages linked. It is possible that a page already exists, and that it is simply linked by the wrong name. Links are often case sensitive, so do a search for a subject before creating a new page. *Don’t vandalize pages. Changes can easily be reverted, and vandals easily blocked. *'A page often includes images', the code for these is written in the source editor and when you publish the page you need to add these manually by clicking on the red link and upload this. Don't forget this! A page looks really unfinished without the proper images. It can take up to 5 minutes for an image to actually start showing up on the page, so don't panic if it doesn't show right away. *To redirect a page to a different page type #REDIRECT Pagename in the source code or to redirect to a specific heading on that page type #REDIRECT Pagename#Heading in the source code. Here is some more info on redirects. *You can easily find any missing template or image on WoWWiki by just copying its name. For example a template called test123 is missing and if you click on it brings you the the page "http://vanilla-wow.wikia.com/wiki/Template:test123?action=edit&redlink=1". You can usually find the relevant one on wowwiki at the link "http://www.wowwiki.com/Template:test123". Copyright and citing sources ''Content from another Wiki'' Wikia is licensed under CC-BY-SA (as are Wikipedia, Wowpedia etc.). Wikis under this license require any content copied to be attributed to the original author(s) in some way. Therefore, if you are copying content or source code from another wiki, avoid any potential Copyright issues by at least mentioning the original source, and by providing a link to the original material. This information could be added to a References category within the article. There are templates you can use for this purpose when copying WoWWiki or Wowpedia articles: * WoWWiki credit template * Wowpedia credit template Example of the template format in the source editor: Tirisfal Glades April-10-2006}} *''Keep in mind that Wowpedia was created as a clone of WoWWiki on October 20, 2010. So, the content history of any article will be identical between the two wikis up to that date.'' ''Images'' Wikia has a built-in licensing information system, which prompts users to enter copyright information when they . There are many options to choose from within a drop-down box, so be sure you take the time to specify what licensing category the image falls under. It never hurts to type additional information about the source of the image (such as the artist/author's name) in the "Summary" box before uploading. Image Licensing Types: *Fair Use *Content from another Wiki *Creative Commons-Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) *Public Domain See also *Community Portal *Help Desk Category:Policy Category:Help